4 ms·

All excellent points but I'd remove gamers from there: > (gamers and video professionals being an exception) I play Stadia, 4K HDR 60FPS, just fine on a gigab

All excellent points but I'd remove gamers from there: > (gamers and video professionals being an exception) I play Stadia, 4K HDR 60FPS, just fine on a gigabit ethernet connection and 150MBit internet connection. Any games not streaming the entire video are fine with just kilobits/s of data, as long as the latency is good. So the case for home 10GE is even weaker ;)

aequitas 5y ago
You probably even don't need gigabit. A Stadia stream ranges from 10Mbit to 50Mbit depending on the quality settings. Latency and other network users are far more influential on gameplay.
xondono 5y ago
I understood GPs point to be “everyone is pretty much on wifi except professionals and gamers anyway”.
buro9 5y ago
Gamers aren't a strong answer :D but they're the audiophiles of home computing hardware and networks and the most likely to overspend in the belief that it's better :D
- kodah 5y ago
  Gamers being hard wired has everything to do with consistent latency in twitch style FPS's. That said, consistent latency is pretty beneficial in most PVP games.
- Ourgon 5y ago
  Hm, that's taking it a bit far given that I've yet to see any gamer who believes that e.g. taping plastic bags with gravel to their network cables [1] will lower their ping times (if it is not for weighing down a cruddy connector which only works when you press the damn thing down, that is). There does not seem to be a gamer-equivalent of $30000 speaker cables [2] (8 ft., add $1500 per additional ft.) or $10.000 power cables [3] either. No, audiophiles still hold the biscuit for being the most easily deluded moneyed demographic out there. If Hans Christian Andersen were alive today he'd write a story about it, "The Emperor's new Speaker Cable" [4] where a little boy is the only one who dares to comment on the piece of rusty barbed wire connecting the speakers to the amplifier. [1] https://www.machinadynamica.com/machina31.htm https://www.machinadynamica.com/machina31.htm [2] https://www.synergisticresearch.com/cables/srx-cables/srx-sc/ https://www.synergisticresearch.com/cables/srx-cables/srx-sc... [3] https://www.synergisticresearch.com/cables/srx-cables/srx-ac/ https://www.synergisticresearch.com/cables/srx-cables/srx-ac... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor%27s_New_Clothes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor%27s_New_Clothes
  - Tostino 5y ago
    I love how much more ridiculous this has gotten since I last looked at this space ~15 years ago.
  - LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
    Oh. Really? Why not compare the insane prices of thermal paste and compounds per volume/weight with the stuff that is used industrially? Not always, but often used for results which could be called statistic noise. Very diminishing returns. All for pushing reviews with many bar graphs over two dozen pages, and so much more page impressions. Like the rest of gamermedia, too. Woo!
    - Ourgon 5y ago
      Show me the diamond-dust cooling paste for $10000 per CPU and you'll be right - for a little while. Soon you'll find that paste in larger $50.000 thimble-sized containers to be rubbed under all equipment "to open up the sound stage". Raving reviews will come in, "as if the composer is standing next to you", "the lows were really clearing up, as if the sun broke through the clouds".
      - LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
        Hm, k. BUT...everything counts in large amounts :) So we have the very few audiophiles which totally ignore the thin copper layer on cheap PCBs, versus the whole market segment of twitchy gamers going for Bling, Bling, Bling without function on their RAM, coolers, vs. the equivalent stuff installed in laptops and servers which lacks that :-)
m_eiman 5y ago
> as long as the latency is good. Which is what rules out wifi :)
jcelerier 5y ago
Weird, SteamLink on gigabit ethernet is barely useable here
- globular-toast 5y ago
  Looks like SteamLink only has a 100mbit/s NIC? People do often vastly overestimate how much bandwidth things need. The latest 4K HDR Blu-rays are easily streamable over 100mbit/s with a big enough buffer. A big buffer is no good for real-time gaming, of course, so they probably cap the peak bitrate to <100mbit/s which would be fine I imagine.
  - jcelerier 5y ago
    It's the steamlink app of a samsung tv which is from 2020, I doubt it's 100mbit
    - globular-toast 5y ago
      You might be surprised. There are still quite a few 100mbit/s NICs shipped in new things. It would save them a few pennies. Raspberry Pis only got gigabit NICs in 2018 and only usable at gigabit speeds in 2020. Pis are more capable than a lot of smart TVs I've seen.
- AceJohnny2 5y ago
  Perhaps more of an encoding performance issue on the host computer?
ericd 5y ago
Seems like they're saying that gamers would prefer wired to wifi, which I think is reasonable - it's not so much a bandwidth issue as a latency issue - wifi has higher latency, and higher variance than wired ethernet, especially if you get a crappy client joining and filling up the airtime with retry attempts. But maybe that's dominated by ISP variance for most.

aequitas 5y ago

You probably even don't need gigabit. A Stadia stream ranges from 10Mbit to 50Mbit depending on the quality settings. Latency and other network users are far more influential on gameplay.

xondono 5y ago

I understood GPs point to be “everyone is pretty much on wifi except professionals and gamers anyway”.

buro9 5y ago

Gamers aren't a strong answer :D but they're the audiophiles of home computing hardware and networks and the most likely to overspend in the belief that it's better :D

kodah 5y ago
Gamers being hard wired has everything to do with consistent latency in twitch style FPS's. That said, consistent latency is pretty beneficial in most PVP games.
Ourgon 5y ago
Hm, that's taking it a bit far given that I've yet to see any gamer who believes that e.g. taping plastic bags with gravel to their network cables [1] will lower their ping times (if it is not for weighing down a cruddy connector which only works when you press the damn thing down, that is). There does not seem to be a gamer-equivalent of $30000 speaker cables [2] (8 ft., add $1500 per additional ft.) or $10.000 power cables [3] either. No, audiophiles still hold the biscuit for being the most easily deluded moneyed demographic out there. If Hans Christian Andersen were alive today he'd write a story about it, "The Emperor's new Speaker Cable" [4] where a little boy is the only one who dares to comment on the piece of rusty barbed wire connecting the speakers to the amplifier. [1] https://www.machinadynamica.com/machina31.htm https://www.machinadynamica.com/machina31.htm [2] https://www.synergisticresearch.com/cables/srx-cables/srx-sc/ https://www.synergisticresearch.com/cables/srx-cables/srx-sc... [3] https://www.synergisticresearch.com/cables/srx-cables/srx-ac/ https://www.synergisticresearch.com/cables/srx-cables/srx-ac... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor%27s_New_Clothes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor%27s_New_Clothes
- Tostino 5y ago
  I love how much more ridiculous this has gotten since I last looked at this space ~15 years ago.
- LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
  Oh. Really? Why not compare the insane prices of thermal paste and compounds per volume/weight with the stuff that is used industrially? Not always, but often used for results which could be called statistic noise. Very diminishing returns. All for pushing reviews with many bar graphs over two dozen pages, and so much more page impressions. Like the rest of gamermedia, too. Woo!
  - Ourgon 5y ago
    Show me the diamond-dust cooling paste for $10000 per CPU and you'll be right - for a little while. Soon you'll find that paste in larger $50.000 thimble-sized containers to be rubbed under all equipment "to open up the sound stage". Raving reviews will come in, "as if the composer is standing next to you", "the lows were really clearing up, as if the sun broke through the clouds".
    - LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
      Hm, k. BUT...everything counts in large amounts :) So we have the very few audiophiles which totally ignore the thin copper layer on cheap PCBs, versus the whole market segment of twitchy gamers going for Bling, Bling, Bling without function on their RAM, coolers, vs. the equivalent stuff installed in laptops and servers which lacks that :-)

m_eiman 5y ago

> as long as the latency is good. Which is what rules out wifi :)

jcelerier 5y ago

Weird, SteamLink on gigabit ethernet is barely useable here

globular-toast 5y ago
Looks like SteamLink only has a 100mbit/s NIC? People do often vastly overestimate how much bandwidth things need. The latest 4K HDR Blu-rays are easily streamable over 100mbit/s with a big enough buffer. A big buffer is no good for real-time gaming, of course, so they probably cap the peak bitrate to <100mbit/s which would be fine I imagine.
- jcelerier 5y ago
  It's the steamlink app of a samsung tv which is from 2020, I doubt it's 100mbit
  - globular-toast 5y ago
    You might be surprised. There are still quite a few 100mbit/s NICs shipped in new things. It would save them a few pennies. Raspberry Pis only got gigabit NICs in 2018 and only usable at gigabit speeds in 2020. Pis are more capable than a lot of smart TVs I've seen.
AceJohnny2 5y ago
Perhaps more of an encoding performance issue on the host computer?

ericd 5y ago

Seems like they're saying that gamers would prefer wired to wifi, which I think is reasonable - it's not so much a bandwidth issue as a latency issue - wifi has higher latency, and higher variance than wired ethernet, especially if you get a crappy client joining and filling up the airtime with retry attempts. But maybe that's dominated by ISP variance for most.